The Missing of the Somme. Geoff Dyer
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an undertaking was without precedent but not without a prehistory. The war dead may not have merited cemeteries of their own in earlier centuries, but in some ways the military cemeteries of the Great War represent the culmination and systematic application of developments in civilian cemetery design. These developments were themselves emblematic of the way attitudes towards death had been changing since the Enlightenment. As the spectre of plague receded, so, in George Mosse’s striking phrase, ‘the image of the grim reaper was replaced by the image of death as eternal sleep’. A growing awareness of the link between poor hygiene and illness – and a corresponding association between foul odours and death – saw cemeteries being built away from crowded towns in quiet, shaded settings, in environments conducive to rest. Setting and symbolism encouraged a mood of pantheistic reflection rather than penitence and fear.
Three architects – Lutyens, Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Reginald Blomfield – were given overall responsibility for implementing the principles established by the Commission: white headstones undifferentiated by rank, the Great War Stone with the inscription ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ (chosen by Rudyard Kipling) from Ecclesiasticus. Lutyens wanted the cemeteries to be non-denominational, but was forced to accept the inclusion of Blomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice: the sword of war sheathed by the cross, a simple reconciliation of the martial and the Christian.
With so many graves scattered over the battlefields, bodies had sometimes to be exhumed from the smaller cemeteries and re-interred in larger, or ‘concentration’, plots – though frequently these ‘new’ sites were themselves extensions of original battlefield cemeteries. Some were named after regiments or battalions, but, wherever possible, the wartime names were retained: Railway Hollow, Blighty Valley, Crucifix Corner, Owl Trench . . .
Even after this process of rationalization hundreds of British and Commonwealth cemeteries were spread over Flanders and northern France. The first were completed by 1920, but work continued throughout the decade. By 1934, in the département of the Somme alone, 150,000 British and Commonwealth dead had been buried in 242 cemeteries. In total 918 cemeteries were built on the Western Front with 580,000 named and 180,000 unidentified graves. A few cemeteries were kept – and remain – ‘open’ to bury bodies discovered after the official searches had been completed, in September 1921. Between then and the outbreak of the Second World War, in spite of the major battlefields having been searched as many as six times, the remains of 38,000 men were discovered in Belgium and France. The bodies of the missing still continue to reappear: pushed to the surface by the slow tidal movement of the soil, unearthed by farmers ploughing their fields.
The design is always broadly similar, but each cemetery – due to its location, size, layout and the selection of flowers – has its own distinctive character and feel. Some, like the Serre Road cemeteries, are, in Kipling’s phrase, vast ‘silent cities’. Others are very small, tucked away in a corner of a field, in the crook of a stream, at the shaded edge of a wood.
All, whether large or small, are scrupulously maintained, immaculate. This is strange: cemeteries, after all, are expected to age. In these military cemeteries there is no ageing: everything is kept as new. Time does not exist here, only the seasons. The cemeteries look now exactly as they did sixty years ago.
Then as now the official idiom of Remembrance stressed not so much victory or patriotic triumph as Sacrifice. Sacrifice may have been a euphemism for slaughter but, either way, the significance of victory was overwhelmed by the human cost of achieving it. As if acknowledging that, in this respect, there was little to choose between victory and defeat, between the British and German experience of the war, memorial inscriptions were not to ‘Our’ but to ‘The Glorious Dead’.
The war, it begins to seem, had been fought in order that it might be remembered, that it might live up to its memory.
Even while it was raging, the characteristic attitude of the war was to look forward to the time when it would be remembered. ‘“The future!”’ exclaims Bertrand, one of the soldiers in Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire.
‘How will they regard this slaughter, they who’ll live after us . . . How will they regard these exploits which even we who perform them don’t know whether one should compare them with those of Plutarch’s and Corneille’s heroes or with those of hooligans and apaches.’3
He stood up with his arms still crossed. His face, as profoundly serious as a statue’s, drooped upon his chest. But he emerged once again from his marble muteness to repeat, ‘The future, the future! The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful. And yet – this present – it had to be, it had to be!’
Published in France as Le Feu in 1916 and translated into English the following year, Barbusse’s novel was the first major work of prose to give fictional expression to the experience of the war. A direct influence on Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, it established an imaginative paradigm for much subsequent writing about the war. The passage quoted is crucial, not simply for the content of Bertrand’s speech but for the manner in which Barbusse presents it. The sculptural similes are especially telling. With his ‘marble muteness’ and face like a statue Bertrand becomes, literally, a monument to this present which will, he alleges, be wiped out.
In the final chapter of the book there is a related, equally revealing passage. Following a terrible bombardment the soldiers wake to a nightmare dawn and fall to talking about the impossibility of conveying what went on during the war to anyone who was not there.
‘It’ll be no good telling about it, eh? They wouldn’t believe you; not out of malice or through liking to pull your leg, but because they couldn’t . . . No one can know it. Only us.’
‘No, not even us, not even us!’ someone cried.
‘That’s what I say too. We shall forget – we’re forgetting already, my boy!’
‘We’ve seen too much to remember.’
‘And everything we’ve seen was too much. We’re not made to hold it all. It takes its bloody hook in all directions. We’re too little to hold it.’
The person whose opinions begin this passage speaks ‘sorrowfully, like a bell’. Anticipating Owen – ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ – the discussion turns to whether there can be any adequate recognition of those who have suffered so much. Barbusse also anticipates Owen in his response: by itemizing everything that will be forgotten. ‘We will remember them,’ intones Binyon. ‘“We shall forget!”’ exclaims one of Barbusse’s soldiers,
‘Not only the length of the big misery, which can’t be reckoned, as you say, ever since the beginning, but the marches that turn up the ground and turn it up again, lacerating your feet and wearing out your bones under a load that seems to grow bigger in the sky, the exhaustion until you don’t know your own name any more, the tramping and the inaction that grinds you, the digging jobs that exceed your strength, the endless vigils when you fight against sleep and watch for an enemy who is everywhere in the night, the pillows of dung and lice – we shall forget not only those, but even the foul wounds of the shells and machine-guns, the mines, the gas, and the counter-attacks. At those moments you’re full of the excitement of reality, and you’ve some satisfaction. But all that wears off and goes away, you don’t know how and you don’t know where, and there’s only the names left . . .’
Sassoon’s later claim – ‘Remembering, we forget’ – is inverted: a memorial is constructed from the litany of what will be forgotten. At the end of it all, as with a memorial, there are ‘only the names left’.
‘We’re forgetting-machines,’ exclaims another of Barbusse’s soldiers. Accompanying the draft preface Owen wrote for a proposed collection of his poems was a list of possible contents; next to the first poem, ‘Miners’, is scribbled ‘How the future will forget’. Constantly reiterated, the claim that we are in danger of forgetting is one of the ways in which the war ensured it would be remembered. Every generation since the armistice has believed that it will be the last for whom the Great War